Ho hum. And now I am supposed to be alarmed by the fact “U.S. Army officers have been secretly paying Iraqi journalists to produce upbeat newspaper, radio and television reports about American military operations and the conduct of the war in Iraq,” according to Knight Ridder, itself more than likely chewed through with CIA moth holes (or if not CIA, at least military intelligence, as “officers from the 4th Army PSYOPS group staffed the National Security Council’s Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD), a shadowy government propaganda agency that planted stories in the U.S. media supporting the Reagan Administration’s Central America policies,” and labored away to spin the news at CNN, as we learned back in March of 2000, before the current crop of reality-spinsters had a chance to man the propaganda battle stations in the Bush White House and Pentagon).

Of course, everybody, especially the Iraqis, understand the situation in Iraq is an unmitigated disaster—even the Strausscons know this, although they seem to believe they can fool us and the Iraqis, thus indicating they take us repeatedly for chumps.

“U.S. officials in Washington said the payments were made through the Baghdad Press Club, an organization they said was created more than a year ago by U.S. Army officers. They are part of an extensive American military-run information campaign—including psychological warfare experts—intended to build popular support for U.S.-led stabilization efforts and erode support for Sunni Muslim insurgents.”

I realize many Americans suffer from chronic memory loss—for as Gore Vidal reminds us (lest we forget), we Americans live in the United States of Amnesia. It was a little less than a year ago the Pentagon told us the they would dutifully launch their very own “news service in Iraq and Afghanistan to send military video, text and photos directly to the Internet or news outlets,” not that such (at an estimated sticker price of $6.3 million) is really necessary with the corporate media professionally slanting the news. “The project, called Digital Video and Imagery Distribution System or DVIDS, will also give the Pentagon more control,” according to an AP news item, posted February 28, 2004. In fact, the military outfitted “five Mobile Public Affairs Detachments with a suitcase-sized reporting kit containing digital video and still cameras, a laptop computer and a Norsat NewsLink 3200 satellite broadcast terminal,” the result “aimed at packaging and shipping locally focused stories to small and medium-sized newspapers and TV stations in the United States,” a great deal—or rather only deal—since most journalists and newsfolk are deathly afraid to venture out of their hotels in the Green Zone, lest they get either killed or kidnapped by roving black op teams tasked with making sure nobody finds out the truth about what the Bushcons are doing in Iraq.

And then of course there was Rumsfeld’s Office of Strategic Influence, supposedly canned by “lawmakers” (i.e.., the plutocrats in Washington who spend most of their time courting and chasing AIPAC and corporate money) because—well, because it was so obvious and Orwellian as to be an insult, or so we were told a couple years ago. Well, good ideas devised by Straussian neocons and self-proclaimed reality alchemists never die—they simply get a facelift, pedicure, and name change. “The Bush administration, battling negative perceptions of the Iraq war, is sending Iraqi Americans to deliver what the Pentagon calls ‘good news’ about Iraq to U.S. military bases, and has curtailed distribution of reports showing increasing violence in that country,” the Washington Post reported last October.

The unusual public-relations effort by the Pentagon and the U.S. Agency for International Development comes as details have emerged showing the U.S. government and a representative of President Bush’s reelection campaign had been heavily involved in drafting the speech given to Congress last week by interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. Combined, they indicate that the federal government is working assiduously to improve Americans’ opinions about the Iraq conflict—a key element of Bush’s reelection message…

Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s office has sent commanders of U.S. military facilities a five-page memorandum titled “Guidance to Commanders.” The Pentagon, the memo says, is sponsoring a group of Iraqi Americans and former officials from the Coalition Provisional Authority to speak at military bases throughout the United States starting Friday to provide “a first-hand account” of events in Iraq. The Iraqi Americans and the CPA officials worked on establishing the interim Iraqi government. The Iraqi Americans “feel strongly that the benefits of the coalition efforts have not been fully reported,” the memo says.

The memo says the presentations are “designed to be uplifting accounts with good news messages.” Rumsfeld’s office, which will pay for the tour, recommends that the installations seek local news coverage, noting that “these events and presentations are positive public relations opportunities.”

Predictably, this “effort” to portray the Iraqi occupation as an exercise in American magnanimity—between sprays of phosphorous, plumes of napalm, indiscriminate scattering of cluster bombs, and wanton irradiation by ghoulish way of depleted uranium—failed miserably.

So anxious were the Bushcons to spin cycle the horror of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, they threw Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Charlotte Beers into the fray—but even Beers’ considerable talent as a Madison Avenue public relations hack (she once marketed Uncle Ben’s rice) and “shared values” mandate was unable to convince Muslims worldwide Americans are anything less than skull-and-crossbones Visigoths bent on sacking the Middle East in the name of Big Oil, Halliburton, and a band of demented Zionists on a tiny sliver of stolen land pushed up against the Mediterranean. On March 3, 2003, Ms. Beers resigned her post for “health reasons,” that is to say the futility of her campaign would have eventually given her a stroke.

At any rate, the really funny part of the latest Pentagon effort to sunny-side the Iraq Horror Show comes from the corporate media. “Many military officials,” Knight Ridder continues, “said they were concerned that the payments to Iraqi journalists and other covert information operations in Iraq had become so extensive that they were corroding the effort to build democracy and undermining U.S. credibility in Iraq. They also worry that information in the Iraqi press that’s been planted or paid for by the U.S. military could ‘blow back’ to the American public.”

Eight current and former military, defense and other U.S. officials in Baghdad and Washington agreed to discuss the payments to Iraqi reporters and other American military information operations because they fear that the efforts are promoting practices that are unacceptable for a democracy. They requested anonymity to avoid retaliation….

Moreover, the defense and military officials said, the U.S. public is at risk of being influenced by the information operations because what’s planted in the Iraqi media can be picked up by international news organizations and Internet bloggers….

Finally, military and defense officials said, the more extensive the information operations, the more likely they’ll be discovered, thereby undermining the credibility of the U.S. armed forces and the American government.

Earth to Knight Ridder—the “credibility of the U.S. armed forces and the American government” is a heap of smoldering offal and has been such for a long time now. It is also laughable—in a macabre sort of way—that U.S. officials would claim the idea here is to promote democracy in Iraq when in fact the idea (as revealed by the very white papers penned by the Straussian neocons directing the occupation) is to carve up and dismember the Arab and Muslim Middle East into malleable Bantustan-like chunks. “Much along the lines of an earlier paper by Israeli Oded Yinon , the [A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm] document urges the Israelis to aggressively seek the downfall of their Arab neighbors—especially Syria and Iraq—by exploiting the inherent tensions within and among the Arab States,” summarizes the Center for Cooperative Research. This neocon policy paper, first presented to Likudite fanatic Binyamin Netanyahu, is also all about invading Iraq, as the neocons urged for a decade or more.

Instead of democracy, the Bushcons are sincerely interested in a Zionist gerrymandering process designed to punish Muslims for the sin of their very existence, since they exist uncomfortably close to Israel and not say as swagmen and squatters in the Australian Outback. But then, of course, for the religious among the Zionists, since bald-faced “transfer” (ethnic cleansing) or even genocide is not a practical option, the closest Arabs (Palestinians) should be considered little more than “hewers of wood and drawers of water'’ for the people of Israel, as were the Gibeonites in the Old Testament.

In the Arab world all of this is well known, although in America it is more or less unspeakable, especially in the corporate media, so slavishly bent on lionizing Zionists and demonizing Arabs. Thus no public relations (let’s call a spade a spade—it is crude propaganda) effort will brainwash the Arabs—no matter how Herculean the effort or how much money is squandered—into believing Georgie and the neocon Mafia have the best interests of Muslims and Arabs at heart. It doesn’t matter how many Iraqi journalists—those not dead or hiding in fear for their lives—are on the occupation puppet government or Pentagon payroll. Arabs know about the exigencies of the Zionists because they live with the reality of deranged settlers and serial murdering IOF soldiers every day of the week.

As well, Iraqis live with the horror of the Zionist Master Plan daily as the occupation effort is completely Israelized—from targeted assassinations to random murder of innocents. Bush’s neocon gangsters may fool a few Americans and even themselves, but the Iraqis are not buying into the scam, especially if they have malnourished kids and relatives dying from cancer due to the profligate use of depleted uranium. No “upbeat” fake news stories will make the tumors disappear or magically render clean drinking water from dirty or provide consistent electricity. It will not paper over the random shooting of Iraqi motorists by hired “security” thugs or trigger-happy checkpoint soldiers who are indistinguishable to average Iraqis from Israeli border guards.

Nobody’s fooled—however, in the United States of Amnesia, most of us don’t know we’re fooled (or do we particularly care our appointed and vote-rigging president lied the nation into invasion and occupation) and if we did realize the Pentagon is attempting to sunny-side the gothic horror in Iraq most of us wouldn’t care, especially when the latest episode of the Bachelorette is on the idiot tube.